GitHub Projects: issue disappears from board after moving from Todo to In Progress

[drdrej]

🏷️ Discussion Type

Bug

💬 Feature/Topic Area

Projects

Body

What happened

In an organization-owned GitHub Project board, a newly created repository issue appears in the Todo column. When I drag it to In Progress, it immediately disappears from the Project view. The issue still exists in the repository’s Issues list. This started on September 23, 2026; the same workflow worked the day before.

Steps to reproduce

1. Create a new issue from the organization Project board in the Todo column.
2. Confirm it is visible on the board.
3. Drag the card to the In Progress column.
4. Observe that it disappears from the Project view, while the repository issue remains available.

Expected behavior

The issue should remain visible on the board in In Progress.

Context

GitHub reported an incident affecting API Requests and Projects today: https://www.githubstatus.com/incidents/8zc63m64hy36 . This may be related, but I cannot confirm the root cause. I have not yet verified whether the Project association or a saved view filter changes after the drag. Please investigate whether moving cards during this incident can leave them missing from Projects or whether a repair/reindex is needed.

I can provide the affected Project and issue URLs privately to GitHub Support if needed.

Guidelines

• I have read the above statement and can confirm my post is relevant to the GitHub feature areas Issues and/or Projects.

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[potomyznaesh]

The timing lines up with the Sept 23 incident: during recovery the status page warned that Projects search results could be stale while indexing caught up, and full service was only restored at 04:55 UTC on Sept 24. A card vanishing right after a Status change fits that pattern — the field update was saved, but the view's index hadn't caught up.

If it's still missing, the first thing is to find out whether the item is actually gone from the project or just not shown:

1. Check the item itself — look at Projects in the issue's sidebar, or query it (needs the project scope: gh auth refresh -s project):

gh api graphql -f query='
query {
  repository(owner: "ORG", name: "REPO") {
    issue(number: 123) {
      projectItems(first: 10, includeArchived: true) {
        nodes {
          isArchived
          project { title number }
          fieldValueByName(name: "Status") {
            ... on ProjectV2ItemFieldSingleSelectValue { name }
          }
        }
      }
    }
  }
}'

2. Compare with what the project returns:

gh project item-list PROJECT_NUMBER --owner ORG --query 'status:"In Progress"'

3. Rule out the view — check the board's filter bar for something like status:Todo or -status:"In Progress", and if step 1 shows isArchived: true, restore it from ⋯ → Archived items.

How to read the results:

• No node for your project in step 1 → the item was removed; re-add it from the issue sidebar (Projects).
• Step 1 shows Status "In Progress" but step 2 / the board don't → the project's index is out of sync with the item. Re-setting the Status field has nudged it for some people (see [Projects] Issue added to a Project (v2) does not appear on the board or in the items list until later; Changing its Status makes it show up on the board #208698), but not reliably; if it doesn't help, open a ticket at https://support.github.com with the project and issue URLs.